Nortel today announced their acquisition of Pingtel, a commercial SIP telephony platform derived from the open source sipX Enterprise Communications Server. sipX began in 1999, but in 2004 Pingtel contributed the codebase to non-profit organization SIPfoundry and it was subsequently made available under the LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License). Pingtel also continued to develop a commercially licensed version of sipX marketed under the name sipXchange.

The open source sipX project counted Asterisk as its main competitor, although sipX varies significantly from Asterisk in many ways. Unlike Asterisk, in sipX all call signaling is handled natively using the SIP protocol. sipX contributes call signalling and is not concerned with media and encodings, while calls are set up and packets routed point to point between endpoints. sipX also lends itself to a modular, distributed approach where individual hosts can be deployed to handle specific duties such as SIP proxy and media server.
Pingtel’s most noteworthy enterprise deployment was announced in 2006 for Amazon.com, and reportedly serves as many as 5000 users.

Today’s announcement actually marks the second sale of Pingtel, having been acquired in July 0f 2007 by Burlington, Mass based parent BlueSocket.

It will be interesting to see if Nortel’s competitors in the traditional enterprise telephony market will look to make similar purchases. Companies such as Adtran, Cisco, Avaya and Mitel could be eyeing the likes of Digium/Asterisk, Trixbox, FreeSwitch and others as Microsoft’s OCS initiative shifts into another gear.

The title of this blog post might be the most profound thing I have ever read about Asterisk.

Courtesy of Alec Saunders, I got wind of this post by Jay Phillips that goes into detail in regards to some of the current limitations of the platform as it looks to move from the innovator phase to the early adopter phase. While Jay makes some valid points about making Asterisk easier for the mainstream programmer to build off of, therefore growing their developer base and business, the most profound piece of his post, and what will be lost on most “fringe” telephony folks is Jay’s statement that when it comes to Asterisk,

“most want something other than a PBX”

If there is anything that our 101 things you can do with Asterisk contest proved, it is that Asterisk is being used for things other than it’s original intent – a phone system, due to the fact that you are free to do whatever you want with it. Many argue that Asterisk won’t don’t this or can’t do that, but at the end of the day Asterisk is about more then open source, telephony, developers and ease of use:

It is about the idea of creating something.

Asterisk is powerful because it evokes the thinker, the visionary, the entrepreneur in all of us. Asterisk challenges us to do things we never before thought were possible. It was a catalyst of a whole new way of thinking about telephony and gave down to an entire industry now filled with many projects that compete, work with and improve Asterisk. Asterisk will never satisfy everyone’s needs. It will never be the end all be all of open source telephony, but no project will ever achieve that because most people want something other than a PBX and in order to achieve that you need more than just a piece of open source software.